As part of our enhanced biosecurity standards and plans for optimal flock turnover, we will not add any new rare and fancy chicken breeds for five years. It’s essential to find eggs from multiple sources all at once to enable this plan and be able to selectively breed from diverse stock.
-Mandy Wheaton, Chief Chicken Wrangler
LAST UPDATED ON JUNE 8, 2022
Upcoming Chicken Breeds:
- Black Ameraucana
- Lavender Ameraucana
- Black Copper Marans
- Autosexing Olive Egger
- F1/F2 Standard Olive Egger
- Cream Crested Legbar
- Opal Legbar [Edit: none hatched]
- Mille Fleur d’Uccle
- Golden Neck d’Uccle
- Frizzle d’Uccle [Edit: can’t flippin’ wait to see the feathers grow out over the next week…. cross your fingers for frizzles.]
- Opal d’Uccle
- Golden Bielefelder
- Silver Seabright
- [Edit: Picked up an 8mo laying 55 Flowery Hen, and expecting hatching eggs by mail from a separate line in mid-June.]
Thanks to everyone who voted and weighed in on breeds over the past few months as we made our final choices! We ended up with more breeds than originally intended.
Our hatchery has closed for Spring 2022 after the tragic loss of our flocks in fall of 2021. We went on an egg-pic 2,968-mile road trip to collect excellent stock from several states along East Coast, including our first ever bantams and quail. We have live mealworms and frass for sale in the meantime.
Belgian d’Uccle Booted Bantams
And I did a thing. I ordered bantams. I said I’d never do it. But here I am. We will be bringing home Mille Fleur and golden neck d’Uccle booted bantams. I love them already. My Instagram has been blowing up with stunning photos of them. I just HAD to have them.
And it gets even better, I found Mille frizzles from a second source from some incredible show-quality stock. I’m DYING to hatch them. I have never held a bantam-sized chick and bet it’s the cutest.
Between the regal body shape, lovely coloring, dainty eggs, and charming personality they seem to be the perfect bird for our youngest son to learn the trade with. These will be ‘his’ chickens that he will learn about breeding practices and how to make selections with.
Click to learn more about this breed.
Black Copper Marans
Given the rigorous breeding program ahead, I sourced our Black Copper Marans hatching eggs from six farms.
With this high level of diversity and such amazing dark egg color to start from, I feel like I’m at a good place for an ultimate chocolate egg breeding program. An expected 75-80% hatch rate and an estimated 50% being roosters, leaves us with approximately 30 laying hens by Christmas.
Though not as rare as they once were several years ago when I began keeping this breed, I still feel they have a place in our line of rare and fancy chicken breeds.
Last year’s stock was so amazing I contacted the farms I purchased from last year first.
Click to learn more about this breed.
Gold Bielefelder
For our upcoming auto-sexing breeds, we have purchased gold Bielefelders from three farms. These birds are gentile giants with very heavy roosters, high production of jumbo eggs, and great broody-mama hens.
I have never ever ever seen such large eggs. We could barely close the extra large cartons when we picked them up and made sure to place the on the top of the egg crate stack for the ride home.
They were easily the size of Pekin duck eggs!
The Bielefelder is an all-around a great homestead breed which we look forward to raising here on our farm. This will enable us to offer a female chicks locally and keep the roosters to grow out for our family.
I also look forward to using their feathers in my art studio.
Click to learn more about this breed.
Opal & Cream Legbar [Edit: no opals hatched]
To offer another autosexing breed choice to our customers, we will also be adding Legbar from two farms.
Legbar chickens not only have an autosexing gene, they lay big blue eggs consistently, and the hens have a silly little tuft atop their sweet little heads.
They will also make a great addition to our olive egger plans. [Edit: so few hatched that we will not be placing any in the OE pen.]
Lavender & Black Ameraucana
As many of you may know, Lavender Ameraucana hold a special place in my chicken-mama heart. Those fluffy cheeks, slate blue legs and eagle eyes are just so handsome. Moreover, they lay lovely baby blue eggs and are very winter hardy. They were often the first ones to slip out of the coop on super cold mornings here on the mountain.
We have picked up two colors (and split) Ameraucana from four farms!
I’m also adding a dozen black and black/self-blue splits for both diversity and improved feather quality crosses as needed. Some of the Lavenders last year had feather quality problems and we had just hatched some black splits when we were given the terrible news to euthanize the flocks.
Click to learn more about this breed.
Multi-generational Olive Eggers
We have been generously gifted autosexing olive eggers to add to our flocks. I’m so excited to try them out!
This will create a truly diverse array of green layers, a great addition to a small backyard flock, in half the time we expected.
NOTE: We are also considering Silver Seabrights in mid-June! Photos of stock to come. That would really top off our rare and fancy chicken breed list!
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Thank you for considering our farm for your rare and fancy chicken breeds.
